How To Build Genuine SEO Skills That Will Impact Your Online Sales by John Alexander, 24 November 2006
A beautiful website with no traffic or visibility can't survive in the business world. But a high ranking website that gets tons of traffic, but where no-one is compelled to make a purchase or take action, won't work for you either. Think "visibility PLUS a solid call to action."
Key points
- Make a firm decision to get started.
- Learn from the SEO community by visiting respected forums and discussions groups.
- Subscribe to good newsletters and learn about what the experts say.
- Gain personal confidence through experience and practice.
- In the beginning, set some easy objectives to reach.
- Another easy way to shape your early skills is to learn from the experts by doing a course in person or online.
In this article, I am going to outline a few options to help you build genuine SEO skills, but first it is important to think about what search engine marketing means. It is a fascinating topic, but it takes in much more than just the process of "optimization" alone. Search engine marketing is actually the process of optimization plus effective marketing. You need both of these elements for your website to be successful and to effectively make sales and convert that new traffic.
Here's the thing to understand. Highly relevant pages that are easily found in top search results also need to be absolutely engaging and have a legitimate value to the visitor. They need to compel a response from the visitor - and this is where you can truly begin making money and increasing your sales. Visibility for "quality content" combined with the skill to compel your visitor to "take action" is what will make a nice pay check and make you happy.
Get that idea into your head and you will already be along the road to increasing your online sales.
Okay, just before we talk about options for building your SEO skills, here are a few other important considerations:
- Accuracy of Information and Resources: It is extremely important to choose carefully where you get your training and the source that you put your trust in. If you are going to build your SEO skills, you need to understand where the information you are studying originates. After all, how can anyone possibly know exactly what the search engines are doing? Make it your goal to build the skills from those who can demonstrate long term accuracy. If someone cannot market their own services on the Web, how can they teach you anything?
- The Secret of Accuracy: I'll let you in our own secret for accuracy. I believe that the only way that you can understand what a search engine is doing, is to actually research it. We research everything that we teach our students in our courses and Workshops, because it is the only way to know for sure what is happening. Researching does not mean listening to someone else's theories, it means actually testing and measuring the truth about how a search engine is behaving.
- There is no value in searching for "tricks" or "short cuts" or "cheats" to try and fool the search engines. (The people who are selling you on these ideas do not make money in the SEO industry.) Don't waste your time going on a hunt for some little trick or two that will not deliver any genuine value. Ultimately, the best approach is to grow your understanding and grow your SEO skills.
Let's examine some real easy options for building genuine SEO skills.
There are a variety of ways to study and gain these advantages for your online business, but you may want to consider what your own objectives are with respect to the speed of learning and how important the turn around time is to you.
- One of the first tips I'll emphasize is simply to make a firm decision to get started. There are so many people that will buy a program or purchase a product, but for some reason have difficulty getting to know how to use it: as a result, they never do. So make up your mind right now that you are going to be one of them and that you're determined to do what it takes to learn and succeed. Don't be afraid that you'll make a mistake or do something wrong. Think about it. It is far better to get started on your SEO journey of learning and make a couple mistakes, than it is to let months go by, never make a mistake and never get started.
- Learn from the SEO community by visiting respected forums and discussions groups. You may not get leading edge stuff (that costs money!) but you will get a tremendous amount of good information. And you'll also hear both sides of a story - pros and cons - from the debates that rage within the community.
- Subscribe to good newsletters and learn about what the experts say. Many of them are free to sign up to and they can be a great place to start learning.
- Gain personal confidence through experience and practice. Far too many people hesitate to test out their ideas. The sooner you build your confidence, the sooner you will realize the potential for what you can perform. In the beginning, start with a few of your own sites where you have full creative liberty without the demands or pressures that come from a client.
- In the beginning, set some easy objectives to reach. As you get comfortable competing at a certain level, then you can progress to take on bigger challenges. It's surprising how fast you can grow your skills with a little practice on a regular basis.
- Another easy way to shape your early skills is to learn from the experts by doing a course in person or online. Good courses are worth their weight in gold. Even better, good courses give you unrivalled opportunities to network with your peers and with other experts in person. Relationships forged at these gatherings can last for years and bring you wonderful benefits.
- Another tip for accelerated learning is to see if you can find an expert who will provide you with personal mentoring. Mentoring from an expert usually involves instruction combined with coaching and review work. The benefit is that there is nothing like having a coach or a mentor who is willing to teach you exact processes and strategies in person. It's ultimately one of the quickest ways to learn.
In Conclusion:
Whether you choose to build your skills over a period of time or whether you want to gain those SEO skills more quickly right away, the single most important thing to remember is to make that all important first decision to "Get Started". Then you can take your own websites, and eventually your client's websites to a whole new level of success.
About John Alexander
John Alexander is Co-director of Training at Search Engine Workshops offering live, SEO Workshops with his partner SEO educator Robin Nobles. John is partner in online search engine marketing courses and Director of the Search Engine Academy with local training workshops located throughout North America.
25 comments
Dear John, you really point out some most effectic Points of SEO process with updated knowledge.. I want to suggest you that in future please try to cover the topic "LSI base SEO".
please send me the SEO tip of the day
thank you
Peter Haynes
great article. but can you suggest anything regarding SEO and affiliate marketing? In other words, selling someone else's products along with quality content.
What a load of C. Long text with no relevance whatsoever. Again, we see another article about SEO and online sales that tell people nothing... This is very discouraging when it comes to actually take one of your workshops... Would I have to sit through 5 days of not miningfull information?
You make several good points here. I am about six months into my part-time investigation of SEO and SEM. As I am now officially signing clients for SEO packages, I need to become fluent in the art. So far I have a pretty good idea of where to start for my clients' new websites, but I think becoming an expert will be a year long process if not longer. Besides that, search engines are always changing and this is just another continuing education topic. Thanks for your words of inspiration to those of us trying to master this confusing art.
Steve
Which SEO courses would you recommend please weaventerprises@earthlink.net thanks
Just curious, tried to send a comment on your searchengineacademy.com but never got a confirmation email to complete the question. So I'm sending it to you though this method. My question is... you guys are SEO experts. And I need help. But I just checked the "view source" on searchengineacademy.com and didn't see keywords or description tags. Isn't that one of the basics of SEO's. Or am I missing something?
This is a really light weight fluff article. Waste of my time.
Thank you for this article and related site info. Very helpful. Please send more.
Great article and glad to see as a newbie I am trying to do most of it. I think the Newsletter is really good keep up the good work
very useful! thanks a lot.
That's a good idea. But, as a new comer to internet marketer, sometime our feeling dominates the facts. I mean what we really think good keywords we will apply these without taking any research.
John Alexander's article with your newsletter refers.
I'm currently receiving somementoring on this topic but I would also like to do so alternative reading. John mentioned newsletters, some of which are free. Can you/he make some suggestions?
I have often read that SEO is time consuming and in the end not worth the time it takes because the search engine parameters change so often. What are your thoughts on this and how do you keep up with the supposed changes?
I think you make some good points here. It is unfortunate that you called this a how to and give no solid examples of places to go or sites to visit or books to read.
There is one thing you really do need to mention is the linking strategy and anchor text of your links, these must also contain your main keywords. This is vital to the success of your site.
If people want to get their name out in the SEM community they should offer some advice and teach something innovative and useful. If I’m intrigued by an article I’ll visit your website and blog.
Thank you for a good article.
I am studying SEO to implement on my own and appreciate your insights and advice on not taking shortcuts and making the site valuable for the site visitor, as well as profitable for us via convertion.
My site is a free fundraising option for children’s charities, and by God, I am going to do everything I can to make it a success for the kids!
I agree that it's vital to gain information and training from reliable and accurate sources. It's a shame there is so much information 'pollution' out there which means that it takes an inordinate amount of time before you can root out those quality sources. Thanks - Ewan Kennedy.
Hi John,
I planned to make a site on SEO and I booked a domain & web Space. But not Yet started it.
After Reading your this article I shall complete it in a month.
Thanks
please send me the SEO tip of the day
thank you
trademanufacturer: Nice idea and we'll consider doing this but we don't currently have an SEO tip of the day. But just for you, here are a few for today: Start small but with big plans, target some keywords with little competition, as soon as you are getting some success on Google, target similar keywords to those bringing success. Be patient.
I bought the domain first and added matching articles and then realized how competitive (share Trading)this keyword is. Unable to proceed for any kind of SEO now because of heavy competition. Please advise me.
Reagards,
ShareTradingGuide: Do some keyword research and target some less competitive terms until your site builds its content, links and reputation. You might find a small niche within the market that you can become a specialist in.
Quote: B2C Jewels on his plan to make a site on SEO.
Due to the massive competition you are facing with optimizing for "SEO", I would say you are insane and might as well go back to square one to find a new niche, unless you have thousands of dollars in marketing cash or thousands of back links already pointed to your new "SEO" website. Getting some traffic is easy, but don't you want to work less to make more? Don't fight for something that will take you eons to accomplish!
249,000,000 million is your exact competition for the term "SEO" with a majority of searches for "SEO" going to the following websites:
Website | Average Monthly Search Referrals
seochat.com 173,322 wikipedia.org 119,600,186 seo.com 4,677 seobook.com 267,882 mailanyone.net 584
Now I love the potential to earn 100,000,000+ visitors in traffic monthly, but, the chances are slim to none without some hands down hard core optimizing with loads of cash to get known and create a real viral marketing system. You should do some research about a niche before starting any website or spending money in buying hosting or domains...